It isn't really clear exactly what controls what in a living cell.
I can say that cars are controlled by traffic signals, clocks, and
calendars.

To whatever we ascribe control, we only open up another level of
unexplained control beneath it. What makes DNA readable to a
ribosome? What makes anything readable to anything?

Encoding and decoding, or application and abstraction, or addition
and multiplication, ...

My problem is that this implies that a pile of marbles know how
many marbles they are.

Not necessarily. A n-piles of marbles can emulate a m-pile of marbles.

I could rig up a machine that weighs red marbles and then releases
an equal weight of white marbles from a chute. Assuming calibrated
marbles, there would be the same number, but no enumeration of the
marbles has taken place. Nothing has been decoded, abstracted, or
read, it's only a simple lever that opens a chute until the pan
underneath it gets heavy enough to close the chute. There is no
possibility of understanding at all, just a mindless enactment of
behaviors. No mind, just machine.

To be viable, comp has to explain why these words don't speak
English.

It is hard to follow your logic. Like someone told to you, a silicon
robot could make the equivalent argument: explain me how a carbon
based set of molecules can write english poems ...

By your logic, I would have to explain how Bugs Bunny can't become a
person too.

It can. In some universal environment, it is quite possible that bugs
bunny like beings become persons.

As far as we know, we can't survive on any food that isn't carbon
based. As far as we know, all living organisms need water to survive.

On our planet, but you extrapolate too much.

Why should this be the case in a comp universe?

Open and hard problem, but a priori, life can takes different forms.

I think that the problem is that you don't take your own view that
physical matter is not primitive seriously. Like you, I see matter
not as a stuff that independently exists, but as a projection of the
exterior side of bodies making sense of each other - or the sense of
selves making an exterior side of body sense to face each other.
From that perspective it isn't the carbon that is meaningful, the
carbon (H2O, sugars, amino acids, lipids really), the carbon is just
the symptom, the shadow. Carbon is the command line 'OPEN
BIOAVAILABILITY DICTIONARY" which gives the thing access to the
palette of histories associated with living organisms rather than
astrophysical or geological events.

This is not inconsistent with comp, but I don't find this plausible.
In fact I believe that all civilisation in our physical universe end
up into a giant topological computing machinery (a quark star, whose
stability depends on sophisticated error tolerant sort of quantum
computation) virtualising their past and future. Carbon might be just
a step in life development. We might already be virtual and living in
such a "star". But more deeply, we are already all in arithmetic.

Bruno

Sense is irreducible.

From the first person perspective. Yes. For machine's too.

No software can control anything, even itself, unless something
has the power to make sense of it as software and the power to
execute that sense within itself as causally efficacious motive.

This seems to me like justifying the persistence of the physical
laws by invoking God. It is too quick gap filling for me, and does
not explain anything, as relying on fuzzy vague use of words. I
might find sense there, but in the context of criticizing
mechanism, I find that suspicious, to be frank.

I'm only explaining what comp overlooks. It presumes the
possibility of computation without any explanation or understanding
of what i/o is.

?
How does the programming get in the program?

Why does anything need to leave Platonia?

OK. (comp entails indeed that we have never leave Platonia, but
again, this beg the question: why do you think anything has even
leave Platonia? Physics is just Platonia seen from inside, from some
angle/pov).

By "Seen from inside" you evoke a Non-Platonia. Why does Platonia
need a Physics view? Why should that possibility even present
itself in a Platonic universe?

How does encoding come to be a possibility

Because it exists provably once you assume addition and
multiplication, already assumed by all scientists.

If I begin with numbers and then add and multiply them together to
get other numbers, where does the decoding come in? At what point do
they suddenly turn into letters and colors and shapes and people?
Why would they do that from an arithmetic perspective? We are not
tempted to do this in a computer. We don't think 'maybe this program
will run faster if we play it a happy song through tiny speakers in
the microprocessor'. Even plants have been shown to benefit from
being interacted with positively, but have computations shown any
such thing? Has any computer program shown any non-programmatic
environmental awareness at all?

and why should it be useful in any way (given a universal language
of arithmetic truth).

?
Why should it be useful?
Are babies useful? Are the ring of Saturn useful?

No. They aren't. That's my point. Those things would never arise
from number crunching alone. Numbers begat only more numbers. If you
apply numbers to forms, then you get interesting forms. If you apply
interesting colors, sounds, etc. But numbers will never discover
these things. We discover them. Real things discover numbers, not
the other way around.

Comp doesn't account for realism, only a toy model of realism which
is then passed off as genuine by lack of counterfactual proof - but
proof defined only by the narrow confines of the toy model itself.
It is the blind man proving that nobody can see by demanding that
sight be put into the terms of blindness.

You don't give a clue why it would be like that, except building on
the gap between 1 and 3 view, but my point is that universal machine
or numbers are already astonished by such gap. They can only say
that they live it without being able to justify it, nor even to
define precisely what their 1-view can be, until they bet on
mechanism, and understand (already) why it has to be like that.

Why do you think that I don't have a clue about epistemology but you
claim to speak for the feelings and experiences of universal
machines? Justification is a 3p epistemology. 1p doesn't need to
prove itself in 3p because they are orthogonal to each other. 1p
would need proof that it needs proof for itself. It is a given. You
have to start somewhere - the cosmos has to have some point of
orientation, and 1p is the name we can call that.